Chief Change Officer
#277 Helen Hanison: Outgrowing the Career Everyone Else Envies — Part One
06 Apr 2025
What makes a successful career feel like a trap?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. What happens when your shiny successful career starts to feel like a trap? Helen Henderson has the answer. She went from board level PR executive to career coach.
after realizing that the ladder she was climbing was leaning on the wrong wall. In this two-part series, Helen shares how she hit pause, got unstuck, and built a career that actually fits. We'll talk about career detour, tough choices, and why midlife isn't a crisis. is a chance to redesign. If your job looks great on paper, but feels like sandpaper, this one is for you. Let's get into it.
Helen, good morning. Welcome to our show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.
Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here, sitting in that blue chair behind you.
Let's start with your story. You've gone through quite a transformation yourself, from public relations to branding and now coaching with a focus on career. We'll dive into the why, the how, and everything in between.
Yeah, sure. My name is Helen Hannison. You've already said I'm in the UK. I think what's probably more relevant for your listeners to know about me, though, is that I used to think that I was defined by that thing I did, my PR career. It was a 20-year tour of duty, as I call it now, in global PR firms. So always enormous budgets and global remits and market leading brands.
It was fantastic and I loved it all the way up to when I didn't. And for me, I hit this career crossroads that is a big part of why I now do what I do today. Success is really what it looked like from the outside. I was on the board. I was on and off planes all the time. I know people looking in felt it was successful and glamorous even. For me, I was bumping into a wall.
I don't know how else to explain it. It was very incompatible with becoming a mother for the first time and that junction of mothering and careering was tough to navigate and I hadn't seen it coming, which might be my own naivety, but there you go.
I had thought a lot about replacing myself at home because I assumed in the opposite direction and then found it excruciating not to be present hardly at all for my little one. So what do you do with that? Those jobs are the most important. That's an incredible amount of conflict to live with if you believe you're defined by the one that is less important to you.
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